March 6th, 2007
It seems that sometime late last year Time Warner started outsourcing their Roadrunner Usenet service to Newshosting. That’s pretty insane considering Newshosting boasts 45-day retention and unlimited downloads.
I don’t understand why they would go out of their way to bolster their Usenet QoS, being Usenet is pretty much just a haven for piracy and pr0n these days.
Link.
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March 1st, 2007
Your programmer personality type is:
DHSC
You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.
You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.
You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.
You are a Conservative programmer.
The less code you write, the less chance there is of it containing a bug. You write short and to the point code that gets the job done efficiently.
Programmer Personality Test
A pretty spot-on assessment IMO.
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February 23rd, 2007
Congrats to MySpace for becoming this generation’s AOL.
- Horrible patched together user interface? Check.
- Piles of crap functionality retroactively slapped in with zero thought as to how it impacts the overall design? Check.
- Impossible to figure out how to accomplish even the most minuscule task? Check.
- You got mail? You got shitty music playing automatically when you enter every page.
- Haven for pedophiles? Check.
- Users embrace it as a result of Stockholm Syndrome?
Check.
- Will live on for at least another decade, with no improvement whatsoever, solely due to user lock-in? Check.
To wrap it up, I’ll leave you with this.
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February 19th, 2007
No matter what the area of interest, somewhere there is a collection of aficionados (aka geeks) who take things too far.
Case in point. All I wanted was a LCD TV. Then I stumbled on this 266 page, 8,000 reply thread on the set I want. Wow, I don’t think I want it anymore.
The takeaway: Ignorance is bliss.
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February 11th, 2007
Nobody looks good wearing a Bluetooth headset. Nobody.
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February 6th, 2007
The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music. — Steve Jobs
Link
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February 5th, 2007
Overheard on a forum…
Poster 1: So, I just quit WoW for good, (deleted all characters etc), uninstalled the game, canceled the subscription and took a deep breath outside and looked at the sky. Now I suddenly have a crapload of time available (35 hours a week).
Poster 2: 35 hours? Pfft, casual.
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February 2nd, 2007
Based on the number of empty HDTV cartons I am seeing in the garbage on the way to and from work each day, I proclaim the HDTV era is finally here.
Come July, this badboy is mine.
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January 16th, 2007
First pirated HD DVD movie hits BitTorrent
The pirates of the world have fired another salvo in their ongoing war with copy protection schemes with the first release of the first full-resolution rip of an HD DVD movie on BitTorrent. The movie, Serenity, was made available as a .EVO file and is playable on most DVD playback software packages such as PowerDVD. The file was encoded in MPEG-4 VC-1 and the resulting file size was a hefty 19.6 GB.
So, basically, all the honest people who purchased legitimate HD-DVD content have to suffer though a bunch of performance debilitating checks and balances in the OS to watch their content on Vista, while the pirates get an unfettered version to watch wherever they want.
And HDCP is good, how?
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January 14th, 2007
The content protection technologies embedded in Vista are scary enough for me to hold off on installing it for the foreseeable future. WTG Hollywood for treating honest people like crooks and WTG Microsoft for bending over to accommodate them.
“Certainly much less time than it will take Microsoft and the recording industry to realize they’re playing a losing game, and that trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.” — Bruce Schneier
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